First Monday

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals solely devoted to research about the Internet. First Monday has published 1,835 papers in 274 issues, written by 2,557 different authors, over the past 22 years. No subscription fees, no submission fees, no advertisements, no fundraisers, no walls.

This month: March 2019Playful Twitter accounts and the socialisation of literary institutionsHumour serves a variety of purposes on social media, from aesthetic content creation and social interaction through to corporate and institutional branding. Playful social media accounts tap into existing knowledge while building and consolidating networks. This article presents a contextualising model of commercial, cultural, and specifically bookish humour on Twitter, addressing its global reach and local context in Australia. Two playful Twitter accounts were created to promote AustLit, a repository of metadata about Australian literature. Scholarly institutions and academics were more likely to follow the pseudo-authoritative, numbers-focused @AustLitCodex account, but that the more broadly popular and engaging format was the enthusiasm of @AustLitTrip, with a sheepdog persona. These accounts demonstrate the scope for playful Twitter to build audiences for cultural institutions and promote positive, albeit niche, online discussions.

Also this monthCyber Pearl Harbor: Analogy, fear, and the framing of cyber security threats in the United States, 1991–2016During the two and a half decades leading up to the Russian cyber attacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, public policy discourse about cybersecurity typically framed cybersecurity using metaphors and analogies to war and tended to focus on catastrophic doom scenarios involving cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. In this discourse, the so-called “cyber Pearl Harbor” attack was always supposedly just around the corner. Since 2016, however, many have argued that fixation on cyber Pearl Harbor-like scenarios was an inaccurate framing that left the United States looking in the wrong direction when Russia struck. This essay traces the use of the cyber Pearl Harbor analogy and metaphor over the 25-year period preceding the Russian cyber attacks of 2016. It argues that cyber Pearl Harbor has been a consistent feature of U.S. cybersecurity discourse with a largely stable meaning focused on catastrophic physical impacts. Government officials have been primarily responsible for driving these concerns with news media uncritically transmitting their claims. This is despite the fact that such claims were often ambiguous about just who might carry out such an attack and often lacked supporting evidence.